1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a data control apparatus and a data control method for controlling data communication among a plurality of devices, and a computer-readable storage medium having stored thereon a program for causing a computer to implement the method.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, data exchange of moving images, still images, and the like between devices having a storage medium has been performed via a wired connection or a portable storage medium. However, the progress in wireless communication techniques in recent years has enabled communication between devices separate from each other by providing the devices with a wireless communication interface.
Thus, devices with a wireless communication interface can easily perform data exchange of multimedia data such as moving images, still images, text information and the like with each other without a wired connection or a portable recording medium.
A data control apparatus for a plurality of wireless devices that have a communication function for performing wireless data communication is known, in which a connection between the wireless devices is established by generating an identifier of each wireless device and sending the identifier to each wireless device (see Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication (Kokai) No. 2001-345817).
However, the above conventional data control apparatus has the following problems. For example, when data is to be transferred between devices, a user needs to make a wired connection to each device and to make settings such as a transmission mode and a reception mode for each device. Thus, a problem is that these tasks require efforts.
In addition, if the devices themselves are miniaturized, the size of an input unit such as keys and the size of a display unit for checking the setting status of the transmission mode or the reception mode are also reduced. This causes difficulty in input operations and in visual recognition of the displayed content, posing another problem.